وَٱلتِّينِ وَٱلزَّيْتُونِ
The وَ at the head is not a conjunction but the particle of the oath; it was treated in detail in Sūrat al-ʿAṣr. The wāw at the head of the second word, on the other hand, is the wāw of conjunction: the oath is established once, and the second member is attached to it.
The question of God's swearing by a created thing was likewise taken up in the section on al-ʿAṣr; I do not repeat it here. Let me only recall the criterion I found strongest there: the thing sworn by is the witness to the ruling that is about to be uttered. That criterion will work here too — one has to ask what the four things sworn by testify about man's stature and his fall.
Root: ت-ي-ن. The word's family of derivatives in Arabic is thin; tīn is a noun that stands almost on its own. This is usual with the names of fruits.
The fig is one of the oldest cultivated plants of the Mediterranean basin. Archaeobotanical research records finds suggesting that the domesticated form of the fig may reach back in the Near East to dates earlier than wheat and barley; this is a debated matter in the history of agriculture, and I make no claim about a definite ordering. What is certain is this: the fig is among the oldest and most familiar trees of this country.
A line has to be drawn here. In the exegetical literature, and especially in popular writing, long accounts circulate about the nutritional value of the fig: it contains this vitamin, it is good for that illness, and therefore the verse is announcing the fact. This method is wrong and will not be used in this text. The verse says nothing about the contents of the fig. That a thing is sworn by is not a claim about its chemical composition.
What is genuinely remarkable about the fig lies elsewhere: that it is a fruit which can be eaten both fresh and dried, can be kept a long time, and is eaten whole, from seed to skin. There is no part of it to be picked out. Dried figs were a portable food in the caravan economy. In that world, then, the fig was not an ordinary member of the category "fruit" but a privileged product in respect of being storable and portable. This is not something the verse says; it is information about the object the word points to.
Root: ز-ي-ت. From the same root comes zayt (oil). What is striking is this: in Arabic the general name for oil and the name of the olive derive from the same root. In this culture, that is, the first thing that comes to mind at the word "oil" is olive oil; the word has recorded it.
The olive, unlike tīn, occurs in several places in the Qurʾān, and the places where it occurs give the word weight:
- "With it He brings forth for you crops, olives, date palms, grapes and fruit of every kind" (al-Naḥl 16/11) — in a list of favours.
- "and the olive and the pomegranate, alike and unlike…" (al-Anʿām 6/99; similarly 6/141) — in the context of the variety of creation.
- "Vineyards and gardens, olives and date palms" (ʿAbasa 80/28-29) — in the enumeration of provision.
But the real occurrence is al-Nūr 24/35:
"…kindled from a blessed tree, an olive neither of the east nor of the west, whose oil would almost give light though no fire had touched it…"
This verse stands inside one of the densest similitudes in the Qurʾān — the verse of light — and there the olive tree is called "blessed". This is not an incidental attribute: blessing, by the sense in its root, is a thing's continuing steadily and increasingly. The olive tree lives for hundreds of years and goes on bearing as it grows old; this is the concrete ground for giving it the word.
The qualification "neither of the east nor of the west" in the verse of light is meaningful too. In the classical explanations this phrase is taken to mean that the tree stands in an open place that takes the sun all day — that is, it is not left in shade for half the day; the oil of such a tree is purer. I transmit this as an observation about cultivation.
It is possible to draw a link between the olive's being the subject of an oath in this sūra and its occurring in the context of "light" in Sūrat al-Nūr: olive oil is the substance that opens the darkness in that world. It is the fuel of the lamp. I record this not as a ruling of exegesis but as an association the word carries.
Both are the produce of trees, both are among the basic plants of this country, both can be stored. Their being named together is not a customary pairing in the language — nowhere else in the Qurʾān do these two occur together.
This is the strongest support of those who defend the place reading: had the aim been to enumerate favours, one would have expected the date-and-grape pair that is always named together in the Qurʾān's lists of favours. In enumerating provision the Qurʾān names dates and grapes side by side many times (for example al-Naḥl 16/67, al-Muʾminūn 23/19). Here it is not those but another pair that has been chosen. That choice is a sign — what it is a sign of is the disputed part.